Moises,

I attended one of their vendor sessions at Southwest Fox. After eTecnologia disappeared, I am skeptical of anyone proclaiming compatibility with VFP. However, after attending their session, I think there is good reason to believe they are going to accomplish what they say they will. Here are a few things to consider:

1. They already have a successful business model serving the Clipper market and have effectively taken it over. IIRC, they have around 25,000 developers, most in Europe, which isn't huge, but is respectable. They want to take over the VFP market as they did with Clipper.
2. They have a lot of experience with compilers. They don't have a big learning curve in that area.
3. They aren't (over)promising 100% compatibility with VFP. Although, compatibility with documented behavior may be possible, I think actual 100% compatibility including VFP quirks/glitches is unobtainable.
4. In the past year, they have done a lot of work and make progress towards their goal, though they are still about 18 months away from release (I don't remember if that's Beta or final).

You should ask them for the latest slides they showed at SWFox. That said, I don't think it sounds "too good to be true", and I wouldn't necessarily choose them as my future development platform (but maybe I will). The transpiler and converters will get you part of the way there, but I imagine there will still be a good bit of manual migration involved. As he said, they will probably get your closer than anyone else though.

While the product is fully supported and offers advances like multi-threading and 64-bit, Alaska has a heavy focus on backwards compatibility and protecting investments in existing code. That's music to many ears, but it also means they won't be trying to support the latest technologies coming out of Microsoft. So, if you want a product that works with .NET, WPF, Silverlight, the-next-big-thing, Alaska will tell you up front that this may not be the platform for you.

>Below is the reply I got from Alaska today.
>
>
>===================================================================
>The transpiler build into PolarFox (the codename for the next version of Xbase++)
>will be able to transpile all FoxPro code and ensure syntactical and semantical
>correctness of the code produced. Also, PolarFox will have support for most
>elements that come with Visual FoxPro, including FoxPro forms and reports.
>
>However, it should be noted that we're not rebuilding FoxPro. This would be
>doing you a disservice because the end product would be the same and hence
>wouldn't solve any of your problems!
>
>Instead, we intend to take the core elements of Visual FoxPro, merge them
>with the strength of our own technology platform, and take everything to the
>next level ;-).
>
>On other words: 100% compatibility and "no human intervention required"
>cannot be guaranteed by anything but FoxPro itself. But I'd expect us to be
>as close as anybody can get...
>=====================================================================